Day 4. Better Safe than Sorry

September 27th 2018

I’ve just Googled the effects of having or not having external links on the site. Obviously, it’s great to have your site linked to from somewhere else, particularly if it’s a well regarded site. You might get some web traffic and ultimately a booking, and backlinks as they’re known, are important for rankings (more on that later). But I’ve always been less keen on giving out links on our site as there seemed to be a suggestion that it could dilute its strength. I didn’t want the net result to go against us as it were. I’m now reasonably convinced that some links, to good sites anyway, are probably a good thing. Without them you can possibly seem like a dead end site. And you can always make them ‘nofollow’ links. I think that means they are still appreciated as links so you can appear a more integral part of the wider web, without giving up the precious ‘link juice’. (Just look at all the fun new phrases this experience has taught me!)

So, I’ll be adding some links in to previous posts and using them more in the following ones. And I’m even going to use one here: Comodo SSL. Why? Because that’s where I bought the SSL certificate we use on our site.

I’d been thinking how great it would be to have a shiny padlock display next to our website address and to have https rather than http. It means the site is more secure and should generally be regarded as more trustworthy. I did look into it some time ago and found it all a little daunting. Now though, it seemed unavoidable. Google Chrome has started showing warnings for sites that are not https and there are many suggestions online that secure sites rank better – and it’s probably true. Type in ‘large cottages devon” into Google and you should find bicclescombegrange.com on the second page. We’ve been as high as 11th (so close!) and all of the top ten (and in fact the vast majority of the top 50) are https sites. It could just be that they’ve done that as part of a general proper approach to creating a well placed site, but personally I couldn’t see us getting into the magical top ten and on to that first page without a padlock of our own.

So I looked into it some more and took the plunge. And, as it happens, it was a lot more straightforward than I imagined. The certificate wasn’t too expensive, the switch over was fairly painless and now we’re officially a site to be trusted!

Yes we are! Firstly though, just pretend you don’t know and act surprised when this news comes out in a few blog posts time. And secondly, don’t get too excited; I will be discussing exactly how big a bottle of champagne this is worth opening shortly…